Last Friday, I went to use my Chase Sapphire Reserve card and it was declined. I tried a different Chase card and it was also declined. Upon calling the number on the back of the Reserve card, I was told that Chase has decided to end their business relationship with me, that it's not a decision they make lightly, and that all of my cards and my checking account have been closed. If I hadn't called the number on the back of the card, I would have thought I was being scammed. The customer service agent wouldn't give me any details at all. In fact, they said they aren't privy to any details at all and just repeated a script over and over again (as did their supervisor and all other customer service reps I've spoken to since on the phone).
The next morning, I went to my local branch and sat down with a personal banker. He looked over my account in detail. He was extremely sympathetic and tried to help, but he said he was blocked from seeing anything related to the closure and that it didn't come from the branch (it came from Chase corporate). He said that typically he can see that a decision has been made based on a drop in credit, churning cards, deposits and withdrawals of large sums for money laundering, other debt risks, or frequent overdrafting of accounts. None of this applies to me. My credit score is 823, I haven't opened or closed a credit card in years, I pay off all my cards and never hold a balance, and I'm not transferring in or out large sums of money. His personal guess was that I was erroneously flagged for money laundering or terrorism by their algorithm and somebody signed off on that nonsense. He told me a letter should be arriving in a few days and that it could possibly clear things up some.
This has been tremendously stressful. All my credit was with Chase - which I'm now realizing was a terrible decision - and I've saved up quite a bit of Ultimate Rewards points that I now have to scramble to do something with. I also have no idea if I've been somehow flagged as a terrorist or if my identity has been stolen. I'm also worried about the hit to my credit score.
So far, I've transferred all of my cash to a new checking account, have researched what new credit card to apply for, and changed every single one of my randomly generated passwords just in case.
Has anyone ever been able to get to the bottom of this if they were in the same situation? Were they able to clear their name, so to speak, and get their cards back open? Any suggestions of how to get Chase to tell me what the hell is going on? Any help would be very much appreciated.
Submitted October 21, 2020 at 07:33PM by improbableshapes https://ift.tt/35pXSJy
